Thursday, September 25, 2008

Diane wanted to know how my super-sweet, G-Force, kick-butt computer is doing after the Apple dude with the missing humor chip got through with her. We added some more RAM. BAM! And now even Bob can't diss my rockin' Mac. She's fast and sassy now, just the way she was always meant to be. We worked lightning fast this week to make a super-fly movie of our trip to Lake Powell. Wish you could all see it. I'm going to post it on my other website soon -- maybe even today, in case you can't live without it (which you probably cant, but you just don't realize it.)

Anyway, just wanted to fill you in on the rest of that story, because I know your lives were out of balance without the full conclusion.

Friday, September 19, 2008

I talked about our little yellow Toyota pickup truck in a previous post. Well, after we had traveled that thing half to death, my parents gave it to me to drive when I was in high school. I loved that little truck! She did have her issues, though. The worst one being that in the winter she would often just not start. Usually on the coldest days, of course. My favorite.

We lived on a hill, and on those super cold days I would have to push-start her. I had about two blocks to pop the clutch and get her started before the road leveled out. By the middle of the last block I would be pleading and coaxing and begging that truck to start. If she did, I'd drive off to school happily. If she didn't, I'd have to walk the two blocks uphill in the snot-freezing cold* and get my mom to drive me to school--and usually be late.

The poor thing was on her last leg for years. But somehow, no matter how many potholes I hit or jumps I went over or jump-starts we pulled off, she'd just keep on running. For that reason I named her Ette (etta) for Endure To The End. It fit her, and she and I got along great. Good times.

Recently Bob got a little Toyota pickup for cheap. Real cheap. Free. It's just like Ette, if Ette was red. And jacked up. And had cool smitty bars for bumpers. The boys were way excited, mostly because we're going to sell the old minivan to pay for the repairs the "new" truck will need to get it up and running. I'm sure they'll miss the minivan. No, I'm kidding, they won't miss the minivan one bit.

Anyway, we went boating one day and on the way back Bob was giving out assignments for when we got home. Mine was to jump out real quick and move the little red truck out of the way so he could pull the boat around. I was excited and anticipating the nostalgia, even though I had yet to even sit in the thing. But I had been regaling the kids with stories of my Ette adventures and no one else knew how to drive a stick shift.

So when we got home I jumped out of the big red truck and jumped into the little red truck. Andie got in with me. It was dark. I couldn't see anything at all. That's okay, I had driven this same truck for years and I was sure my muscle memory would take over and it would be a piece of cake.

I turned the key and started it up. It lurched backwards. The windshield wipers (or half-wipers, as they were broken off at the joint) scraped across the glass. I stabbed at whatever pedals I could find with my foot, to no avail. I heard Bob honk behind me. I slammed into Bob's nice, red truck. Hard.

All I wanted at that point was to have the last 20 seconds of my life back. I wanted a redo, a mulligan, a do-over. I was distraught because, well, I guess driving cushy automatic transmissions for the past 20 years had taken over my auto-pilot and I had forgotten about a little thing I like to call...

A CLUTCH!!!!

*I've been using this term since junior high, when I would stand outside waiting for the bus on those days when it was so cold that each nose hair was an individual icicle. And upon sniffling my nostrils would freeze closed, stuck, sealed. I'd have to do a little Bewitched move while flaring my frozen nostrils in order to release them. Snot-freezing cold, that's what that is.

Monday, September 15, 2008

This is not going to be long. I'm still bitter about it. Yes, it's embarrassing, but more than that -- maddening! Last week I posted a lengthy post about a recent EM. After a day or so I decided that I would take my young friend Ali's advice and make my blog less boring by adding photos. Hmm. Well, maybe it's a sign that I'm too big of a lame-o head to actually be able to add photos to my blog without DELETING AN ENTIRE ENTRY!! Which is what I did.

I tried to recover it. No go. I wondered if I had it saved somewhere else. Of course not. Could I remember it and rewrite it? Har, har, har, NO! I can't! It was hard enough the first time! Well, maybe I will. Ugh! I don't want to, but I probably will. I don't know when, I'm still pretty stunned. And bitter.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Oh man. After that last post I thought of so many things from my childhood, and every one of them embarrassing! Sheesh, I was such a total nerd!

I remember my tic-tac-toe shirt that had removable vinyl X's and O's that stuck on with high tech VELCRO. I wore that to school! And played tic-tac-toe on my own torso!

We used to have a little yellow Toyota pickup (who will co-star in my next post, so stay tuned) with a shell on it that we would travel in with my parents in the front and my four sisters and me in the back with sleeping bags, pillows, coloring books, and travel size games. We made up lots of songs back there, some of which I can still sing to you today and if this blog had audio I would post them here because they would fit perfectly with the theme of EMBARRASSING!

As you can kind of see in my banner picture, my canine teeth didn't come in for like, 2 years, so I had this really goofy smile for a very long time.

In another shirt debacle, I convinced my sister to go along with the idea of getting matching shirts that said "I Heart My Sister," but with a heart, not the word "heart." I believe we got in a big fight about it before she finally relented and we got the two pink shirts declaring our sisterly love.

And one of my favorite memories is when my best friend Becky White and I decided we could be like CHiPs (remember the tv show?) and ride our bikes next to each other down the street like Ponch and Jon. We did it often. We had the best cheer! Here it is: Bips! Bips! We are the Bips! Bimi and Kecky! Kecky and Bimi! Bips! Bips! Yaaaaaaay...Bips!

Are you lucky enough to have had something happen in your life that is so funny (to you, anyway) that you can recall it any time you want to lol? I have more than one. Some of them involve bodily functions, and fall under the "untellable" category. The best one for me, though, is when Becky was going to get a game down from the top shelf in her bedroom closet. No bodily functions involved, so you can keep reading.

That closet was packed to the ceiling! It had blankets and games and dress-up clothes and toys and the humidifier and wrapping paper and stuffed animals and who knows what else? I mean, I made most of that stuff up anyway. Like I'm going to remember what was in my friend's closet from when we were 9 years old! But you get the idea. It was kind of like how they say the California Redwood forest is the largest living organism because the trees are all connected to each other through a giant root system. I'm pretty sure that's how her closet was configured.

Becky couldn't reach the top of the closet, obviously, so she rigged up a little tower of objects to help her climb up. The game was under a bunch of stuff, so she was struggling to dislodge it, while propped precariously on no less than 4 different random doodads. Shockingly, her hazardous little improvised step ladder began to give way and the shift of balance nudged pretty much that entire Redwood forest of a closet into a massive cascade of storage matter.

At that moment, she squeaked out my favorite childhood line: "ACK! HERE COMES IT!" And we were buried in a pile of everything.

It took us HOURS to clean that mess up! But every few minutes we would revisit our initial giggle-fest that had outlasted any previous giggle-fest I had ever had, and can even rival the best ones I've had since. And up until now, to this very day, the vision of that moment can still make me L right OL.

I still use that line occasionally. Maybe even frequently. In fact, a while back I visited an entirely different friend from a different era of my life. She had heard this story years earlier and had heard me use the line several times. I loved it when she was showing me around her apartment and said at one point, "Don't open that closet there, or we'll have a 'here comes it' situation." Nice one, Sarah! Badoom ching!

See that picture down at the bottom of the page? I was just looking at it and I was noticing my banner in the background. Then I thought of how the banner is nearly as embarrassing as the look on my face and the reason for it. You guys remember the Young Women Banners? They were all the craze back in the day. I made this banner in preparation for the big ol' banner exhibit at the Stake House with the theme of "Happiness is..." Which phrase was also all the craze back then, remember?

Anyways, my banner said "Happiness is..." at the top (guess the Polariod couldn't fit the whole banner in the frame), but I can't for the life of me remember what I put at the bottom!